NEW YORK – A suspected terrorist parked a van packed with what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb next to the Federal Reserve building in Lower Manhattan and tried to detonate it Wednesday morning before he was arrested in a terror sting operation, authorities said.

The suspect, 21-year-old Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, is a Bangladeshi national who came to the U.S. on a student visa in January for the specific purpose of launching a terror attack here, authorities said. He allegedly told an undercover agent last month that he hoped the attack would disrupt the presidential election, saying “You know what, this election might even stop,” according to the criminal complaint against him.

The complaint said Nafis wrote a statement claiming responsibility for what he thought would be the Fed attack, saying he wanted to “destroy America” by going after its economy. He referred to “our beloved Sheikh Osama bin Laden” in the statement, which was stored on a thumb drive.

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Nafis, who lives in Jamaica, Queens, attended Southeast Missouri State University for a semester, studying cybersecurity as a sophomore from January through May 2012, a school spokesman said. He sought a transfer to a New York City ESL program and left Missouri after the spring, according to a law enforcement official.

He allegedly sought out al-Qaida contacts to help him, unknowingly recruiting an FBI source in the process. At that point, the FBI and NYPD began monitoring him as he developed the plot, prosecutors said.

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Law enforcement officials stress that the plot was a sting operation monitored by the FBI, Homeland Security and NYPD and the public was never at risk. The materials he believed were explosives had been rendered inoperable, officials said.